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Liberals need to explain why they seek a ‘third way’: Delacourt

Liberals always view their struggles in terms of communications or leadership. But the more existential questions that haunted them after the 2011 election are no less relevant now.

Leader Justin Trudeau and the Liberals don’t own the pragmatic middle, Susan Delacourt writes — Stephen Harper and Tom Mulcair have both occupied that space at times. So the Liberals must persuade Canadians that they occupy the middle ground out of principle. (Ryan Remiorz / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

Political parties, like ordinary human beings, reveal a bit of their own personalities by their reactions to stress and adversity.

Conservatives, with their faith in the market and small business, tend to rush to marketplace tools when they need to shore up failing fortunes — advertising, discounts and money-back offers on your taxes. So this summer, Canadians are being inundated with ads and cheques, not to mention snappy salesmen wearing the company logo on their shirts.

New Democrats, steeped in the culture of unions and community organization, often reply to setbacks with protests about unfair treatment. When the NDP was languishing in the polls these past couple of years, for instance, leader Tom Mulcair and his advisers would say it was because they weren’t getting a fair shake in the media.

Last December, speaking to a crowd of NDP partisans in B.C., Mulcair advised them to monitor the media for examples of Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau being mentioned before the NDP. In that case, Mulcair urged his followers, “write them (the media) a letter. Give them s---.”

The federal Liberals, meanwhile, have somehow acquired a reputation over the years as the party of communications experts. I’ve often wondered why they don’t put this into the party constitution. Liberals are also fond of seeing their leaders in black and white terms — as either heroes or zeroes. Naturally, this doesn’t happen simultaneously or unanimously; hence, the Liberals’ long reputation for internal leadership battles.

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So when Liberals run into adversity — as repeated polls this summer say is now the case — the grumbling about communication and leaders will commence. I can safely predict, after long experience covering this party, that Trudeau will be getting communications advice at every stop he makes this summer.

My favourite example of this Liberal penchant for advice-giving was the backbench MP in the 1990s who told Jean Chrétien that he should do something about his “speech impediment” if he wanted to communicate better. Chrétien went on to win a couple more majorities as prime minister, while the backbencher enjoyed one term in office. The proof is the proof is the proof, as Chrétien once famously said — obviously not from notes provided by the Liberals’ bevy of communications experts.

For something a little different, then, the Liberals might want to situate their troubles this summer in a context other than communications or leadership.

One not-so-outrageous idea might be to return to the existential question that faced the party back in the immediate aftermath of the 2011 election disaster for Liberals — a question I put in a column then this way: “If the Liberal party didn’t exist today, would it need to be invented?”

Or, to be more brutally frank: what is the point of the Liberal party anyway? That question is as relevant today as it was in 2011, and it isn’t one that can be answered by a snappier communications strategy or even a shiny new leader.

Traditionally, the Liberals have been the party of the moderate middle, which should be good news in an election purportedly about the middle class. But there’s a difference between the ideological middle and the economic middle, as has been written before in this space. In a political climate that favours yes-or-no propositions, there’s little room for “maybe” or nuance.

A couple of months ago, at the annual conference of the Canadian Political Science Association, former Conservative campaign chief Tom Flanagan said that the “mushy middle” in Canada tends to thrive when national unity is a live issue. When it’s not, Flanagan said, the Liberals tend to get crowded out of the simple, left-versus-right equation.

That might explain why we’ve seen Trudeau ramping up his attacks on Mulcair this week around the question of Quebec secession.

On this business of the political centre being “mushy,” a distinction should be made. There are two ways to get to the middle of the road in politics — pragmatism or principle.

Liberals don’t own the pragmatic middle — Prime Minister Stephen Harper has occupied that space whenever he’s thought the situation warranted it, and Mulcair has shown he’s willing to go there, too. For evidence, just look at how Harper has run up deficits or how Mulcair embraces low taxes.

If Liberals want to justify their centrist existence, then they have to convince Canadians that they occupy the middle ground out of principle — that on any policy question, they will always look for the third way. It’s not impossible — courts do this all the time, using laws and principles to balance competing interests.

Then the Liberals need to persuade a cynical public that they’ve embraced the middle out of conviction, not crass politics.

But persuasion shouldn’t be a problem. The Liberal party may be in a tough spot right now, but it has all kinds of communications experts.

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